Xylene isomers, orthoxylene (OX), metaxylene (MX), and paraxylene (PX), and ethylbenzene (EB) are C8 aromatics from reforming process or other petrochemical processes. The purified individual xylene products are used on a large scale as industrial solvents and intermediates for many products. The most important isomer, PX, is used for the production of terephthalic acid (TPA) and dimethyl terephthalate (DMT), which are used for the production of fibers, films and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles. In these applications high purity (>99.7%) PX is required. Demand for high purity PX has increased greatly over the past years to meet rapidly growing markets.
Traditional feedstock for aromatics and paraxylene production is catalytic reforming (reformate) or pyrolysis (pygas). Catalytic cracking, or fluid catalytic cracking (FCC), including various variations such as DCC, High-Severity FCC (HS-FCC), Residue FCC (RFCC), is another well-known process that produces fuels, light olefins, and a similar C6 to C10+ aromatics rich stream, known as catalytic naphtha, cat naphtha, or FCC gasoline.
Until recently, refiners did not consider recovering aromatics from FCC gasoline, because the extraction technology would not function with olefinic or sulfur impurities in the feed. There is a known technology which is designed specifically to make this operation by extraction, which permits the direct recovery of aromatics, while rejecting the olefin-rich fraction as raffinate. The sulfur species are also extracted into the aromatic fraction, which are removed in the downstream impurity removing step in the absence of olefins.
There is a known technology, namely Aromatization, to take olefinic hydrocarbon streams, as well as paraffinic or other type hydrocarbon streams, and produces BTX (benzene, toluene, and xylenes). This process technology will take any olefinic components in the C4-C8 range as feed to produce the aromatics. Byproducts are light paraffins and LPG off gases.
It is known to produce xylenes by methylation of toluene and/or benzene, for instance methylation of toluene over catalyst using methanol. The feedstock can be toluene, benzene, or a mixture of toluene and benzene, or a pygas feedstock, or a reformate feedstock, and the methylation product has higher paraxylene content than the paraxylene content of the feedstock.
There are other xylene formation technologies known to the industry which use benzene, toluene, C9-C10 aromatics, or a combination of them as feedstock. Examples of these are benzene/C9-C10 transalkylation, toluene/C9-C10 transalkylation, benzene/toluene/C9-C10 transalkylation, toluene disproportionation (TDP), selective toluene disproportionation (STDP).
To date, the art does not disclose a practical process for production of paraxylene from light catalytic cracking hydrocarbons and catalytic naphtha. In addition, the above processes have not been integrated into a single system that creates significant advantages, including higher xylene yields and lower energy consumption over operation of these processes separately.
In present invention, an improved process is disclosed which uses light and heavy hydrocarbons as feedstock particularly the light and heavy hydrocarbons from catalytic cracking unit, including, in embodiments, the combination of various streams and processes which provides significant advantages over prior systems.